SOURCE: “Death and Desire in Marguerite Duras' ‘Moderato Cantabile,’” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 94, No. 4, May, 1979, pp. 720-30.

In the following essay, Bassoff maintains that death is the only satisfactory consummation of desire for Duras's characters in Moderato cantabile.

The dream reveals the reality that conception lags behind. That is the horror of life—the terror of art.

—Kafka

Marguerite Duras' fiction relies on the lyrical association of motifs rather than the progression of a story, and it defeats the separation between “real” elements and “virtual” elements (dreams, hallucinations, etc.) that is a mainstay of traditional fiction. The mise en scène of desire in Duras' books, moreover, is not dependent on traditional characters—known and motivated. Duras' characters are figures in a rhetorical sense; they allow her to formulate idea and mood in a dynamic way. Moderato Cantabile is about a woman, Anne Desbaresdes, who, while attending...